In this issue

1. Updates and appearances
2. Pep talk: Are ‘creative discipline’ and ‘gentleness’ at odds?
3. Random life stuff

Updates and appearances

Thank you anyone who attended the Brown Handler Residents reading at LitCrawl! You were an amazing audience, and I hope you were as enthralled with everyone’s poetry and prose as I was. I truly feel blessed to be in community with such talent. Our city holds so much creativity.

Cheesing: Kevin Dublin, Maya Kini, and Keli Dailey. We missed Akiko Neumann, who was there in spirit!

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If you’re hankering for more readings, I’ll be returning to read some horror at Story Hour on December 10 at 7pm PST with Dee Holloway. Come chill—and be chilled!

Are ‘creative discipline’ and ‘gentleness’ at odds?

I am watching the backlash against gentle parenting with a sense of distant curiosity. I consider myself a disciple of gentle parenting, even when I lose my cool, use outright bribery, or ask my kids to ‘make the wise decision; stop this caveman behavior; please just do as I say’. The core of gentle parenting (treating a child as an individual with valid feelings, a unique personality, and their own goals and preferences) seems fairly non-controversial.

Some of the backlash is fair. Some people do use it as a justification for never telling their kids no at the expense of everyone else, or fall into parenting so unblinkingly that they run themselves into the ground.

I also hear troubling backlash that echoes our general national backlash towards…y’know…compassion. Namely: kids come out too soft or bratty if they’re gently parented, life is going to kick them in the teeth, etc. I’m starting to see people say out loud on posts that will be indexed and preserved forever that sometimes a kid deserves to be spanked, to be bopped with an open hand if they make a snide remark. As if you can’t raise a good person without inflicting a specific and intentional kind of pain, since the world’s going to do it, too.

As if discipline and gentleness are fully at odds.

Trust me. I grew up in a stifling New England town, and consider myself a reforming brat. You can raise brats plenty fine with the back of your hand and no ‘how does this make us feel’.

My fear re: creativity, as this is a newsletter about creativity and not parenting most days, is it’s only a matter of time before a large sector of creative advice, too, returns to an era of brutality and self-hatred. This is the national mood we find ourselves in, and a reality of uncle cappy. All nighters. Cruel critique. Working until you literally perish from exhaustion—all of this used to be glorified, and I fear it will take on a worse timbre this time around.

If AI doesn’t ruin creative education for a few entire generations (super possible!!! arguably happening!!!), I fear that we will expect creatives to spank themselves while smiling to earn esteem. And not in a cool sexy empowering way.

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Please understand, it’s hard for me to be team creative gentleness. First, because I fight daily against the idea I am, for some reason, the only person alive who does not deserve rest. And secondly, because I lived for decades being creatively brutal to myself, thinking gentleness and discipline were diametrically opposed. I worked punishing hours, thought my work was shit and demanded more, told myself I wasn’t worth the cellulose I was scratching on, you know the drill.

Honestly, things worked out pretty well for me. But could things have still worked out while4 being a little more chill, a little gentler? I will never know, and I’m a bit sorry I’ll never get the chance to try.

This is the thing with gentle parenting. Gentle doesn’t mean deluded. Gentle is not at odds with discipline. Gentle doesn’t mean all bets are off. Gentle is, “I know you are feeling angry, but that doesn’t mean you can hit”; “You want candy for dinner, I feel that way, too, sometimes, believe me, but it’s time to eat some main food to help our body have the energy to play.”

Gentle could be, “I know you’re feeling the skill gap between what you dream up and what shows up on your page, but that doesn’t mean you get to skip practicing.” ; “It’s very possible you’ll submit that and get rejected. Unfortunately, someone must appraise your work for the chance to reach that one person you write for, the person who will see your art as a cosmically sent invitation to keep them going. You are still going after seeing someone else’s art, and it’s time to pay it back.”

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Go too far towards gentleness, and yes—Netflix is a less talkative mistress than the demons in your head. Go too far and that scene you’re scared of returning to, the one that could be better—it stays ‘could be better’, and your intentions and stories are buried on your hard drive forever.

Resist this simple binary of discipline versus gentleness. It’s going to be so easy to set them against each other, especially in the coming days, where sometimes it feels like all this cruelty has to be put somewhere, and why not put it on ourselves. After all, we as creatives will have to be even more excellent as the corpo demand for human creativity dwindles in favor of cheap crappy AI.

(This is despite the marked and visible resistance towards this dehumanization, which is what I choose to focus on most days in order to not go ✨ completely ✨ bananas.)

The scary truth of gentle parenting is that if done right, half the time you are parenting yourself. Half the time you are validating your own feelings, asking more of yourself, all in order to help a tiny person become who they’re supposed to be. This is part of why it’s so terrifying and hard. When most people become parents, I don’t think we consciously know that we’re signing up to reparent ourselves.

But that’s the work. It’s rising to the occasion and breaking yourself open every single day.

I know there’s something you could be more validating about, a feeling you’re afraid to hold fully. I know there’s something you could do right now, in the next few minutes, to take your creativity a little farther. To honor your creative practice.

Be gentle, be disciplined. The world needs your voice.

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I impulse bought a ticket to New York City this month. Man alive, that city is my soul, even though it no longer feels like home. I mostly spent my time distributing knit gifts to friends and family, visiting bookstores, and just wandering with my writing playlist. My best day was over 27k steps!!

I also snagged a ticket for Alix E. Harrow and Ava Reid in conversation on my last night at The Ripped Bodice. To say I am hype to read this (longing! history! lady knight!) would be understatement of the century. The event in Berkeley sold out quickly, far before I thought to look. To fortuitously get to go on my last night in town, across the country—that is such a New York moment.

Have a few photos!

Snapped by Bex Frankeberger. tytyty miss uuuu